Washington's war, not Anakara's

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), Oct 18, 2012 at 16:51

On reading Dr. Pipes' article one gets the impression that it is more remarkable through the points it doesn't make rather than those it does. I find its title a bit misleading and some of the arguments in urgent need of re-assessment.

To state the main point from the very beginning, it is not Ankara, but Washington that is to blame for the war in Syria just as it was the case in Libya where its proxies and allies from al-Qaeda,the Moslem Brotherhood, the Brits and the French paved the way to the nefarious regime change that threw Libya back into feudal era of poverty,impotence and regress. Erdogan despite his big and foul mouth is too weak and dependent on his mighty master to dare unleash a major war on its own. Who will forget how he whined and begged for assistance when just one Turkish plane was shot down. What would he do if he lost a squadron or better all his army aviation in Syria's sky ? Let's also recall that in 1964 a short letter from president Johnson to Turkish Prime Minister Inonu brought the whole Turkish war machine ready to invade and conquer Cyprus as if by a magic wand to an immediate stop. One hears of no similar letters -long or short -sent to Erdogan from Washington, no Stentorian voices from the White House telling him to shut up and stop organizing provocations and inroads on the Syrian border, shelling Syrian territory and maintaining terrorist bases on his own territory.

Today Erdogan is just playing the game whose aggressive and fraudulent rules have been set up in America and tested in the Balkans and Libya. After al-Qaeda and Moslem Brotherhood death squads - the so called "rebels" - have failed to overthrow the al-Assal regime, it's time for the Turkish bloodhound to enter the stage to complete the task in its unmistakably Turkish way -with lies, massacres and atrocies.

There are many grave reasons to believe that the real constellation of forces behind the scenes looks like that and not as Dr. Pipes depicts it as it it were some brinksmanship of a lonely looney Islamist grey wolf in Ankara acting on his own. Far from it!

First, the plans to "clean up the Middle East of the remnants of former Soviet allies" go back to 1991 ,as General Wesley Clark revealed ,when it became clear that the collapsing Soviet Union would not oppose force used by the US. In September 2001 he saw classified documents circulating in the Department of Defense to "take down 7 countries in five years" including Iraq, Syria, Libya and Iran. Clark quoted his source as saying i.al. "We don't know what to do about terrorists but we got a good military and we can take down governments". It seems that in the meantime the US has successfully learned how to harness energy and expertise of terrorists to take down governments too. on such occasions that the mouth is denying what the hands are doing or perhaps vice versa.

Now Dr. Pipes' argument to the effect that Erdogan's warmongering and sabre-rattling "it's all a grand diversion from imminent economic crisis due to borrowing too much" has also its Janus-face (no pun included) that allows to draw different conclusions. According to the IMF Turkey's national debt in relation to its GDP is currently 36,0%, whereas America's own ratio is now 107,18%! So the opposite point could be easily made. Who needs more a diversion from imminent economic crisis? The war in Syria is a grand diversion planned by the broke master rather than its regional lackey. What is at stake in Syria has as we have seen in the case of Libya nothing to do with "democracy", "human rights", "prosperity" and "peace" (to the best of my knowledge neither Turks nor al-Qaeda or the Moslem Brotherhood or Wahhabis have ever brought peace or prosperity to anybody) - but it's all about control of huge energy resources of vast natural gas deposits discovered in the region. If America controls them, they will save America from imminent insolvency and all the disastrous social and political consequences of the fact. Whether it is done with Erdogan's militarists' bloody hands or with al-Qaeda's dirty hands and death squads is not so principal as both work for the same master whether they know and admit it or not.

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